What do Samwise Gamgee from Lord of the Rings, Howie Dorough from the Backstreet Boys, and the evaporated milk from your grandma’s pantry have in common? The answer is that they deserve much more of the limelight than they’ve been granted. Like Gamgee’s unfettered loyalty to Frodo and Dorough’s ineffable falsetto range, this unassuming milk in a can has plenty to write home about.
For starters, it’s shelf-stable—you can have a can or two in your cabinet for months at a time. You can also avoid gambling on a sus carton of milk and mix a can of evaporated milk with water instead to create a quick fix to your dairy needs. It’s an ingredient that imparts both flavor and function to everything from coquito and tres leches to mac and cheese and potatoes.
But what even is evaporated milk?
As its name suggests, evaporated milk is a dairy product made by removing about 60% of the water from cow’s milk through a slow heating process. Once the water is removed, the mixture, which is about 7% fat, is homogenized into an emulsion, then canned and sterilized.
This multistep process didn’t just come to be with a flick of an industrial magic wand or a happy accident, but through several breakthroughs over the course of multiple decades.
Like instant coffee, Cheetos, and M&M’s, evaporated milk was also a by-product of war. As Napoleon’s conquests spread across Europe in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, easily transportable and spoil-resistant food became imperative to feeding his expansive army. But technology was lagging far behind the emperor’s ambitions. So, according to the Evaporated Milk Association’s archives, the French government announced a lofty prize of 12,000 Francs to anyone who could devise a method to successfully extend the life cycle of food.
After 15 years of tinkering in his tiny kitchen on the outskirts of Paris, a confectioner named Nicholas Appert conceptualized the very first iteration of evaporated milk on January 30, 1810. His process involved “reducing a given quantity of milk to one third its original bulk by boiling in an open kettle” and then sealing it in a corked bottle and heating it again in a hot water bath. As the archives note, Appert’s invention was noteworthy not just in its originality but also in that he essentially pasteurized milk long before the time of Louis Pasteur, knowing nothing about microbiology.
Appert’s evaporated milk was the genesis of a tapered path to the canned version we see in stores today. The next phase of the evolution took place in 1853 when an American inventor named Gail Borden filed a patent for evaporating milk in a vacuum. Borden used this method to combine evaporated milk with sugar to create sweetened condensed milk, an essential field ration during yet another conflict—the American Civil War.
But it was a Swiss man named John B. Meyenberg who realized the unsweetened potential of evaporated milk. When Meyenberg’s sugar-free canned milk idea got little traction in his native land, he traveled across the Atlantic to Highland, Illinois. Here, along with a group of Swiss dairy farmers, he established the foremost evaporated milk plant in the US and the world. In 1884, Meyenberg patented “a process of sterilization by steam under pressure while the cans are agitated,” and the following year, the first canned evaporated milk was commercially manufactured. Today Borden’s method of vacuum evaporation and Meyenberg’s process of pressurized sterilization remain key foundations of the industry.
There was still one more problem to solve. The evaporation process caused the fat and water to separate, leading to an unemulsified final product. As a solution, homogenization was introduced in 1909, which took evaporated milk to new heights. The product, now emulsified as milk should be, not only had a significantly longer shelf life but was much more appealing to consumers in its amalgamated state.
During World War I, evaporated milk went to combat again, this time with the armed forces of the United States and its allies. It was “hailed as a boon to the fighting man.” After the war, it lived on through the discharged soldiers who continued to use the product in their civil lives.
What can’t evaporated milk do?
For many Americans, evaporated milk might seem like a relic of the past, but for those of Latin heritage, it’s a conduit to culture. “There is a very distinctive flavor that many of us grew up with which cannot be replicated with any other ingredient,” says the author of Mi Cocina, Rick Martinez. “If you were to use fresh milk or cream instead of evaporated milk, it would seem incomplete,” he explains, “like making a cake and forgetting to add vanilla.”
Nik Sharma, author of The Flavor Equation, likens this unique taste to a mild caramelly note that the milk develops during the evaporation process. Sharma tells me that this makes evaporated milk an excellent ingredient in South Asian desserts like kheer as it helps cut down the cooking time otherwise required to develop those toasty, nutty flavors.
But the flavor is only half of the incomparable equation. “Evaporated milk makes desserts more luxurious, more tender, more rich without adding a lot of extra fat if you were to use cream,” says Martinez. Similarly, it brings creaminess to soups and stews, but more interestingly, Martinez says that it can be quite efficient in tenderizing meats. Sharma agrees. “Salts help meat turn tender but also increase their water-holding capacity,” he explains, and evaporated milk is rich in a particularly powerful form of salt called phosphates.
Evaporated milk is also a saving grace in cheese and dairy-based sauces, in which curdling can easily compromise that coveted smooth and silky texture. “When milk curdles in the presence of an acid and/or heat,” Sharma explains, “the casein proteins change their electrical charges and shape.” This causes milk, which is an emulsion of water and milk proteins, to separate. But evaporated milk has a built-in set of armor against such catastrophes. According to Sharma, when whole milk is gently heated during the evaporation process, “the casein starts to get covered by the soluble whey proteins,” thereby protecting it from further heat damage, making evaporated milk less susceptible to curdling.
You’ll see this at play in my Dauphinoise potatoes recipe, which veers away from the conventional roux or egg route and leans on a combination of heavy cream and the canned stuff instead. Simmering the potatoes in the evaporated milk mixture injects that nutty flavor into every slice. The low water content makes for a stable base where the cheese can easily incorporate with the dairy mixture. It yields an extra-luscious, cheesy interior that holds all the layers in place once it's baked and cooled. My colleague Jesse Szewczyk also tapped into the powers of evaporated milk to create his one-pot pumpkin mac and cheese. The canned milk gives his orange-hued masterpiece a velvety look and functions as an “added insurance and one less risk factor” against a greasy, split mess.
Unlike typing an essay using a typewriter, incorporating evaporated milk into your cooking regimen isn’t all that difficult. Martinez recommends mixing it in your morning coffee and using it in place of milk in recipes, taking note of the flavor and texture it adds to your dishes. With each experiment, you’ll soon discover the limitless inspiration in a can of evaporated milk.
